Invocations for Peer Mutuality Circles

The Ashland, Oregon mutuality group used the following opening statement for several years when they first began meeting. The statement was written by Bob Valine in 2009, and is offered here as a model, with his permission. Bob is also the author and editor of “The Second Birth: Stories of Awakening within the Heart of Community,” and “Dancing in the Fire”

OPENING STATEMENT FOR WAKING DOWN IN MUTUALITY GROUPSWelcome to our Waking Down in Mutuality group. Our purpose in coming together is to offer support for each other as we experience the stages of the awakening process and the integration, healing, self-exploration and growth that follow. Everything that is shared in this group is confidential, including the names of those who come to Waking Down. We are not here to "fix," change, offer advice or intellectualize. We are here in our hearts for each other, and for ourselves. We are here to greenlight what is rising in the moment, however painful or joyful, honoring the individual process of the mystery that we are. Feedback can be silence, a smile or a tear. A few words can say more than many syllables. We offer each other compassion, acknowledgment, holding. We honor where every individual is in their process. That is where they need to be. When giving feedback we don’t talk about ourselves, our experiences; we focus on the person sharing. If something is rising in you that needs to be spoken about yourself, speak. If not, your silence is also a gift. Please remember that we have a limited time, and there is no need for everyone to share. Before speaking be sure that whoever is sharing is finished. There may be a need for silence and a few moments for that person’s process to deepen. Be yourself. There is no right or wrong way. Sometimes when we don’t know what we’re doing, the unexpected blessings happen. We do mutual gazing at the beginning of our time together. It can also be done in our closing circle. Gazing is sharing ourselves with the other. It is also a way to see ourselves. There is no right or wrong way to do it. There may be times when you don’t want to gaze. That also is a sharing of yourself.

In gazing there’s a transmission that can activate the awakening and deepening process.

Be aware that Waking Down in Mutuality is a powerful process that can take us into unchartered and challenging parts of ourselves. Working with teachers, mentors and, as appropriate, a therapist is highly recommended. Welcome.

The Only True Medicine

When you sit with a friend in pain,when their world no longer makes sense;when confusion rages andno rest is to be found.

Just for a moment,will you resist the temptationto make things better,to reassure them,to provide answers,even to heal them?

Will you offer your stillness, your listening,your presence, and the warmthof your immediacy?

Will you hold them in your heart,with the same tendernessof a mother holding her little one?

Will you embrace them where they are,without needing them to change or transformaccording to your own needs and schedule?

Will you stay close,holding your own impatienceand discomfort near?Will you look into their eyesand see yourself?

Will you stay in the inferno of healingwith them, trusting in disintegration,knowing that you are only witnessingthe falling away of an old dream?

Sometimes in doing nothingeverything is undone,and love is revealed to bethe only true medicine.

Matt Licata and Jeff Foster (Matt's blog entry for March 15, 2015)

There is a wild grace that is everywhere

There is no need to transcend anything here,for you have taken birth in a sacred world.Whatever arises in your immediate embodied experienceis none other than the path itself,a gateway into the wild dimension of love.

Even your despair, your confusion, your fear,your anger, and your sadnessare revelations of intelligence,pouring into this realityto expose a secret place within you.

From the perspective of awakened mind,there is no bias for wisdom over neurosis,divine over human, or clarity over confusion.For anything met with pure awareness and open warmthis self-liberated into the ground of being itself.

This is a spirituality of intimacy, friends!of the breaking open of your naked, messy, vulnerable heart.Fall into the unknown and come closer, and even closer than that.There is a wild grace that is everywhere,that keeps the stars from falling out of the sky.

It is this same grace that has assembled you as you are, cell by cell.

To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements, or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, to welcome, to accept.

Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond. Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings. The beauty of listening is that, those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking their words more seriously and discovering their own true selves. Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you.

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."

[from his book Out Of Solitude ]

The jewels hidden in the dark soil of the body

At times, the greatest gift we can offer a friend in pain is to sit in the darkness with them, removing the burden that they change, ‘feel better,’ or ‘heal’ in order for us to stay close. It may feel like urgent action is being called for and that we must shift their depression to joy, their sadness to bliss, and their hopelessness to hope. But in doing so, we disavow the jewels that are hidden in the dark soil of the body.

Let us love the other so much that we refuse to pathologize their present, arising experience, and create with them a sanctuary in which their emotional world can unfold and illuminate. Let us honor the integration that is occurring and the raging wholeness that they are, in both its peaceful and its wrathful expressions.

Above all, to do whatever we can so that they know in their hearts that we will not remove our love, our attunement, and our presence simply because their experience is not conforming to our personal and collective fantasies of happiness and light.

As we weave a home for our own unmet sadness, disappointment, and despair, we withdraw the projection of our unlived lives from the environment around us. For it is to the degree that we can provide safe passage for the unwanted within that we can truly love another.